New Huntington play: Why is talking about race so hard?

By R. Scott Reedy, Correspondent

Saturday

Aug 25, 2018 at 4:43 PMAug 25, 2018 at 4:44 PM

In “The Niceties,” a new drama from Brookline-born playwright Eleanor Burgess, Zoe, a black student, and Janine, a white professor, both exceedingly bright and decidedly liberal, meet to talk over Zoe’s term paper on the role of slavery in the American Revolution.

Their ensuing disagreement over the stance Zoe takes in her work quickly escalates from an argument between student and professor into a major campus incident at their elite northeastern university that makes the national news, and stands poised to destroy their lives.

“The play is about what happens when the student asserts that slavery played a positive role in the American Revolution. The story is about both American history and also why it is so hard to have conversations about race.

“A huge point of the play is that if you carelessly say something about American history or where we are now, you almost certainly offend someone,” explained Burgess by telephone recently from a Back Bay rooftop.

After developmental productions in Portland, Maine, and Washington, D.C., Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company – in association with Manhattan Theatre Club and the McCarter Theatre Center at Princeton – will present the play’s world-premiere engagement Aug. 31 to Oct. 6 at the Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts, before it moves on to New York and New Jersey.

A graduate of Brookline High School, Burgess earned her undergraduate degree in history at Yale, and recently completed her MFA in dramatic writing at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. It was a 2015 incident at Yale that inspired her to write this play.

That autumn, a campus email cautioning students against donning insensitive Halloween costumes led a professor to champion the holiday instead as an acceptable time for disobedience. The ensuing debate rolled into weeks of protests and months of heated discussion.

Burgess, who had graduated some years earlier, has said that the on-campus and online uproar over the incident, and the shortage of rational discussion on both sides, left her to consider why things went so awry between so many.

“Talking to each other has gotten harder and harder, and for very good reasons. For a long time, in white circles we were blissfully ignorant because we weren’t hearing from people who disagreed. The internet has raised the stakes, however, because whatever we say becomes public.

“We’re hearing from everyone, so we’re aware of all the places where we disagree at the same time. We’re at the point now where you hear from all fronts at once,” says Burgess.

When it comes to her characters, that means that even people with similar beliefs can find themselves on opposing sides.

“Zoe and Janine are two well-meaning, well-intentioned people with shared goals who discover that they are a lot farther apart than they ever thought they were,” says Burgess.

“There is a huge disparity on who gets to have authority. On both the left and the right, the idea of expertise and prestige are under attack. And there is a very real question as to whether or not you can use your personal life experience to read backwards into history.”

While the play may have used a real-life circumstance as a stepping off point, Burgess says it is not a dramatic re-telling of the Yale incident.

“This story is only loosely inspired by what happened at Yale. My characters are amalgamations and fabrications, and the incidents in the play are different,” says the writer.

But while Zoe and Janine may not be based on any specific friends or former professors from her own college history, Burgess says she has a real affinity for the pair.

“I love both these women so much. They each have their own problems and serious personality flaws. I get annoyed with them, but I also feel very proud of them” she says with a laugh.

The now Brooklyn, New York-based Burgess is also very proud of her hometown.

“In Brookline, people take seriously their responsibility to the rest of the world. My teachers at Heath School and BHS were the best. They taught us to be good and to do our best to have a positive impact on other people,” recalls Burgess, whose early memories of the Huntington are also vivid.

“The Huntington Theatre Company is where I first fell in love with theater. My birthday falls near Christmas, so one year, when I was maybe 12 or 13, I asked my parents for a combined, theater-related gift and they took me to the Huntington.

“I can still remember seeing ‘Hedda Gabler,’ ‘Breath, Boom,’ ‘Jitney’ and ‘Betty’s Summer Vacation.’ I loved the range of shows you could see at the Huntington because my favorite thing was not knowing what world I’d be in when the curtain went up,” says Burgess.

A 2011-2013 Huntington Playwriting Fellow – whose play, “Chill,” was given its world premiere by Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell in the spring of 2017 – Burgess is pleased to be home again in Massachusetts.

“It means the world to me that the Huntington is going to be the first theater company to present ‘The Niceties.’ This play is definitely a bracing call to action, but it’s also funny, juicy, and dramatic. I hope it will open people’s minds and hearts,” says the writer.

Burgess is quick to acknowledge that she has not set out to offer solutions, but rather to encourage individual thought.

“The play is not a polemical. It’s designed instead to be a jumping-off point. I’m not giving audiences the answers,” she points out. “I’m inviting them to a cage match and letting them come to their own conclusions.”